Beautiful Objects Research Articles

Ceramic Arts in Africa: A Curator's Perspective

| african arts SPRING 2007 It has been nearly two decades since African Arts published the special issue on African ceramic arts edited by Marla Berns (1989, vol. 22, no. 2). Since then, there has been noteworthy collaborative research on ceramics in particular regions, a number of important localized studies by individual scholars, and several widely distributed catalogues published in conjunction with major exhibitions surveying African ceramic arts. In parts of Africa where ceramic vessels are pervasive some are clearly the focus of artistic elaboration, whether they serve as objects of both utility and beauty in domestic settings or carry symbolic import central to social identity, economic and political status, ritual practice, and belief. Their study reveals the skill and invention of their makers, who are, more often than not, women.1 And yet, ceramics continue to be underrepresented in Africanist art historical literature in proportion to their importance as a form of expressive culture, and signifi cant gaps remain in our awareness and understanding of historic and contemporary ceramic traditions across Africa. This issue brings together the research of a number of scholars whose work exemplifi es some of what has been accomplished in the last two decades.2 The articles foreground important themes in the study of African ceramic arts, most especially documentation and historical reconstruction, iconographic analysis, the elucidation of ritual and social signifi cance, and the celebration of individual artistry. In this introduction we offer some refl ections on our experiences researching and writing about African ceramic arts and we signal some of the limitations of the fi eld’s current state of knowledge in an effort to spark interest in future research. Ceramic Arts in Africa

De la « Great Exhibition » à l’Esthétisme : entre production et poïétique

The opening of the Great Exhibition in May 1851 corresponded to the birth of a new culture of the manufactured object. In spite of its official aim to celebrate British industrial power, the Exhibition also brought together many works of art, including objects from Antiquity which were apparently remote from the preoccupations of modern Victorian Britain. And yet, throughout the second half of the 19th century, Antiquity seemed more and more bound to modernity. This paper will focus on the links between the art object and the commodity thanks to the many ekphraseis in the official exhibition catalogues (1851 and 1862). From the 1860s onwards, the Aesthetes began to show a similar interest in beautiful objects from Antiquity and other periods, while claiming at the same time to be modern stylistic craftsmen. Our aim will thus be to show how technè and poïesis, production and poetics were seen to interact through the presentation of the object as subject, as a work of art, beyond any material, moral or commercial concerns.

Catalogus Fossilium Austriae. Band 2. Echinoidea Neogenica

Catalogus Fossilium Austriae. Band 2. Echinoidea Neogenica. Andreas Kroh. 2005. Verlag der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna, 210 p., 82 pls., pb. ISBN 3-7001-3491-6 (printed edition), ISBN 3-7001-3560-2 (online edition). Many types of sea urchins fossilize well, with preservation of minute details. Fossil echinoids are therefore of great scientific value. From them, much can be learned about past environmental conditions, biogeography, and biodiversity. However, echinoids are also objects of great beauty, holding fascination at both macroscopic and microscopic inspection. In spite of the rather dry, ancient-sounding title, this book captures much of this scientific and aesthetic fascination. It is also an object lesson in how to do taxonomic monography in a time when this activity is regarded by many bandwagon-jumping peers as something to be left in their dust. A monograph of this kind should put that attitude where it belongs. Long after trendy works in current vogue have had their electronic and paper corpora fully recycled, solid books like the Catalogus will continue to be consulted for …

Pets in America: a history

Entertaining and informative, Pets in is a portrait of Americans' relationships with the cats, dogs, birds, fishes, rodents, and other animals we call our own. More than 60 percent of U.S. households have pets, and America grows more pet-friendly every day. But as Katherine C. Grier demonstrates, the ways we talk about and treat our pets - as companions, as children, and as objects of beauty, status, or pleasure - have their origins long ago. Grier begins with a natural history of animals as pets, then discusses the changing role of pets in family life, new standards of animal welfare, the problems presented by borderline cases such as livestock pets, and the marketing of both animals and pet products. She focuses particularly on the period between 1840 and 1940, when the emotional, behavioral, and commercial characteristics of contemporary pet keeping were established. The story is filled with the warmth and humor of anecdotes from period diaries, letters, catalogs, and newspapers. Filled with illustrations reflecting the whimsy, the devotion, and the commerce that have shaped centuries of American pet keeping, Pets in ultimately shows how the history of pets has evolved alongside changing ideas about human nature, child development, and community life. This book accompanies a museum exhibit, Pets in America, which opens at the McKissick Museum in Columbia, South Carolina, in December 2005 and will travel to five other cities from May 2006 through May 2008.

The Role of the Fine Arts in the Spiritual Life

The Role of the Fine Arts in the Spiritual Life Basil Cole OP (bio) and Jem Sullivan (bio) Cardinal Ratzinger has written about the role of the arts and the theologian in the following manner: The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb. Better witness is borne to the Lord by the splendor of holiness and art which have arisen in the community of believers. . . . A theologian who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental: they necessarily are reflected in his theology.1 Taking many hints from St. Thomas Aquinas, we hope to show that engaging oneself in the fine arts is more than simply pleasure for the senses and that the arts need to be integrated as part of life. The appreciation of the fine arts is a kind of moral virtue, and it is not adequate to approach art as a consumer of culture or as a listener seeking emotional release or entertainment or as a passive receiver.2 The problem with the contemporary culture may be characterized by bad taste and by too many consumers enjoying lovely melodies [End Page 118] and rhythms, poems, literature, movies, and the dance while accepting an antigospel way of life concomitantly promoted attractively by the sounds of beauty flowing from the now wealthy high priests of the contemporary culture—the rock and movie stars. The beauty of the fine arts cannot be fixed in a mold for it is not static but changing. That is their nature.3 Because all of the fine arts have a recognized ability to get down into the depths of one's consciousness very easily and quickly, it is necessary that theologians take them more seriously, instead of viewing them simply as a means of entertainment. An author of the late 1920s, Leonard Callahan, called to mind the significance of beauty, which of course is involved in all the arts: It is in the resemblances which exist between the mind and beauty that we find the true cause of feeling of beauty; the apprehension of the beauties of nature and of artistic works brings with it a keen delight, because in their perfections the mind discovers an image of its own perfection, and the complement of its aspirations. There is in the human mind an innate and unquenchable desire for knowledge, of effecting through an ideal assimilation the union of other beings with ourselves.4 The life and growth of virtue according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church is a road that requires personal effort in cooperation with family, culture, and above all grace (Catechism,177). The journey begins, normally, in the home where the offspring learn to live the four cardinal virtues for the natural and supernatural person, together with the three infused virtues (faith, hope, and charity). In addition, it is necessary that they cultivate, where possible, according to their talents and vocation, the intellectual virtues: philosophy in its fullest sense, science, speculative and practical wisdom, and ars (art or skill), which is the virtue that makes things and also creates beautiful objects. These values are necessary so that children or young teenagers can develop a sense of personal honor and a love [End Page 119] for the common good of their many surroundings: family, school, church, and society, along with the various other associations they will eventually belong to. They must eventually learn to surrender a sense of isolated autonomy to a more collaborative lifestyle with one's fellows, or put theologically, young people must learn to live in communio with fellow Christians and solidarity with all others. At the same time from the beginning, the Christian must also develop a personal relationship with the triune God through Jesus Christ, the angels, and saints, especially the Virgin Mary. The parallel between the lifelong spiritual journey and the work of an artist-craftsman is described by John Paul II when he notes that "all men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life; in a certain...

Early Koranic Manuscripts: The Blue Koran Debate

The art of calligraphy and illumination of manuscripts holds a revered place in Islamic art because Musilms believe that God revelaed to them the World through the Prophet Muhammad in the form of the Koran. The beauty of the Blue Koran, one of the most exquisite early manuscripts of the Koran, speaks for itself with its richly dyed parchment with gold and silver inking. But this object of beauty is an object of mystery as well. A century-long debate among scholars centers around the Blue Koran and its provenance. Here their opinions will be weighed and new evidence and theories will be brought to light. This project was begun in anticipatio of the exhibit at the McMullen Museum in the fall of 2006 of the David Collection, an impressive and varied collection of Islamic art.

"She is herself a poem": Caresse Crosby, Feminine Identity, and Literary History

When Gertrude Stein immortalized those American expatriates living in Paris during the 1920s as Lost Generation, she was referencing the sense of alienation characterizing that cohort of artists and writers. (1) Despite intense interest in the modernist period, the publisher, editor, and writer Caresse Crosby has remained lost, remembered as an object of beauty, a poem, rather than as an active agent, a poet. (2) This article will explore Crosby's ultrafeminine self-presentation, its benefits and disadvantages to her career, and her literary legacy. Although many modernists rebelled against aesthetic tradition in their work, they often reinforced misogynistic social norms. Critics followed suit, instituting a gendered hierarchy of artistic production. As scholar Suzanne Clark has demonstrated, [T]he modernist revolution turned away from ordinary language and everyday life, resulting in the of intellectuality that the at the expense of a masculine experimental style (3). Other feminist scholars have recovered the work of many women erased by the modernist ambivalence that resulted in the persistent gendering as of that which is devalued (Huyssen 53). Our understanding of modernism has expanded with scholarship on women writers and editors, salon culture, lesbian sexuality, and the role of gender within modernism. (3) In the act of recovering Crosby, we find a case study in the subversive potential of performance during modernism and the sociohistorical conditions that interpreted that femininity. Kay Boyle described Crosby as distressingly (qtd. in Conover, Caresse Crosby 14), but there is little doubt that Crosby's performance of the was a source of power during her life. Yet this enactment of the subsequently erased her substantial contributions to literary modernism. Judith Butler's notion of performativity provides a lens for investigating how Crosby constituted a gendered identity. Gender operates as a circuit such that the effect of performing gender is to produce and maintain the regulatory practice of gender (Gender Trouble 24). Thus Crosby's performance of a stereotypically feminine role maintains the system by which she is evaluated and categorized. Subjects are not free to choose participation in this system; Butler explains, 'activity' of this gendering cannot, strictly speaking, be a human act or expression, a willful appropriation, and it is certainly not a question of taking on a mask (Bodies that Matter 7). However, the inadequacy of the binary system creates a space for play. (4) If, as Butler contends, [g]ender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts, then we can read Crosby's naming practices, appearance, poetry, and self-described behavior as the means through which she performed femininity (Gender Trouble 140). The modernist period was a time of changing ideas about women, and Crosby presents an interesting blend of the old and new. She was one part Angel in the House, a consummate hostess who nurtured other artists, and one part New Woman, sexually liberated and fully invested in a productive public life. Unlike Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, and other better-known modernist women, Crosby was heterosexual and married. Although her marriage itself was in many ways unconventional, her sexuality and marital status place Crosby in a traditional role. Her husband Harry's published diary, Shadows of the Sun, reveals his interpretation of the relationship in traditional terms, with Caresse as the feminine--beautiful, sexually desirable, and pure--to his masculine. This is evident in the terms he uses to describe their relationship: is sweeter than honey (Caresse) / What is stronger than a lion (Harry) (228). (5) Although they could afford servants, she was his domestic angel. …

MENINIO IR GAMTAMOKSLINIO UGDYMO SĄSAJOS: ŽAIDIMAI VAIZDAVIMO PRIEMONĖMIS KAIP APLINKOTYRINĖS VEIKLOS PASKATA

According to the primary school natural science education curricula cognitive activity has to be diverse and its content must be permanently changed. It is purposeful to supplement the educational process with children’s literature, music, folklore, acting, drawing and games (General Curricula and Education Standards, 2003). Game is one of the most universal and efficient child’s primary education strategies. Creative and orientated combination of game and artistic activities in the process of natural science education enables to seek that primary school students both perceive the environment as the aesthetic totality and get used to take care of it, both notice the beauty of nature phenomena and objects and feel the need to take care of nature, both perceive the interdependence of animate and inanimate nature and feel the interrelation of nature with various arts and artistic activities. Observation is the activity that is accessible to primary class pupils and serves as a basis for more complex steps in the teaching and learning process. Because the observation of the nearest environment can be strongly encouraged by the wish to depict the objects of the nearest environment in various ways, this article presents the examples of games employing depiction means, which not only integrate natural science education and artistic education but also promote active cognitive environmental research activity. Key words: primary education, cognitive activity, game employing depiction means.

Gems: Objects of aesthetic beauty and scientific curiosity

Gems: Objects of aesthetic beauty and scientific curiosity

David Adjaye: houses: recycling, reconfiguring, rebuilding

David Adjaye is the most exciting and accomplished young architect to emerge on the international scene in many years. The combination of material inventiveness, creative clients and modest budgets has produced a refined and comprehensive body of design work - and Adjaye is only 38 years old. He was born in Tanzania the son of a diplomat, and his wide-ranging education, both cultural and formal, has allowed him to respond deftly to wildly differing projects, from gritty urban contexts - such as London's Whitechapel multimedia centre and an extension for New York's New Museum - to elegant pastoral retreats in more natural surroundings. The innovation in Adjaye's career is exemplified in his residential works for a wide variety of clients and budgets. Perhaps his best-known projects are the houses he has created in a range of settings for such creatives as artist Chris Ofili and actor Ewan McGregor. The winner of a competition to design a new building for the Nobel Foundation and the architect of the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Adjaye is currently enjoying enormous worldwide attention in both specialist and journalistic presses. This publication, his first monograph and an object of beauty in its own right, is a timely celebration of a young talent at the height - and yet at the beginning - of his creative powers.

Difficulties teaching Java in CS1 and how we aim to solve them

In 1971 Dijkstra noted that as a teacher of programming he 'feels akin to a teacher of composition at a conservatory. He does not teach his pupils how to compose a particular symphony, he must help his pupils to find their own style and must explain to them what is implied by this' [1]. In similar vein, Don Knuth suggests that 'computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty' [2].Traditionally, most Computer Science programs offer an introductory programming methodology course (CS1). In recent years, many institutions have subjected this course to major changes. One common alteration has been a move from a procedural paradigm to an Object Oriented (OO) paradigm. In many cases, this is manifested as a change to programming in Java. Emerging from this transition is the apparent anomaly that many students fail to understand OOP concepts, especially when required to use them in problem solving.Our panel represents researchers from four different countries who have all encountered such problems with a CS1 course. In this light, the panel focuses on CS1 difficulties and aims to address solutions to the 'Java problem'. Although we bring our own insights to the considered issues, we aim to engage the panel audience in discussing the nature of the problem and the propriety of the proposed solutions.

The Practical Significance of Taste in Kant's Critique of Judgment : Love of Natural Beauty as a Mark of Moral Character

In ? 42 of Critique of Judgment, Kant expanature only because our experience of it (sometiates on relation between taste and morality how) contributes to our moral vocation. when he explains that we have an intellectual in natural beauty.' He insists that taking such an in natural beauty is always a I. THE INTELLECTUAL INTEREST IN NATURAL BEAUTY mark of a good soul (Kennzeichen einer guten Seele) and that if a person's capacity to feel Given Kant's well-known thesis that pure judgpleasure in contemplating beautiful in ments of taste are devoid of interest, his nature is habitual, this indicates that he or she claim that we do-and should-take any kind has a mental attunement favorable to moral of in beautiful should strike us as feeling (moralischen Gefihl glinstige Gemfithsurprising. To be precise, Kant has argued, in stimmung) (KU 5: 299; 165-166).2 Further, first moment of Analytic of BeautiKant declares that we do and in fact should ful, that aesthetic are disinterested require others to take a direct in in two distinct senses. In first place, no beautiful in nature, thereby suggesting that we can serve as determining ground or are in some sense obligated to cultivate taste basis for a judgment of taste because any such (KU 5: 302-303; 169).3 dependence would undercut both autonomy This paper attempts to analyze and assess this and purity of taste. In second place, Kant particular feature of Kant's account of pracinsists, in a note appended to former claim, tical significance of taste, namely, his theory that judgments of taste, of themselves, do not that an aesthetic appreciation of natural beauty even give rise to any interest (KU 5: 205n; is intimately connected with moral character.4 46).5 Having initially defined in Section I addresses very concept of an intelCritique of Judgment as the liking we connect lectual in beautiful in nature and with representation of an object's explains what is involved in loving natural (KU 5: 204; 45), Kant later remarks that all beauty in this particular way. Section II consists in pleasure in existence of attempts to determine why Kant thought that a an object (KU 5: 296; 163).6 The direct implidirect, intellectual in natural, but not cation of Kant's thesis that pure aesthetic judgartistic, beauty is a sign of a good soul. The conments of reflection are entirely disinterested, cluding section, Section III, explores one puzzle then, is that pleasure we feel in contemplatthis analysis raises, which is whether Kant ultiing beautiful (in art and nature) is in no way mately grants a merely instrumental value to connected with any concern we might have for natural beauty, insofar as he suggests that we existence of beautiful objects. This is precisely take pleasure in existence of beauty in Kant's point in noting that question of

Beautiful Objects as an Extension of the Self: A Reply

In their comments, Frohlich (this issue), Monk (this issue), Tractinsky (thisissue), Overbeeke and Wensveen (this issue) addressed a wide variety of in-teresting issues relevant to the study of beauty. The methodological aspectsare especially valuable. Besides the regular debate of what constitutes goodresearch,theyrevealmanyunresolvedhigher-levelconceptualdiscrepancies.To resolve those and to find a shared understanding of what beauty is andhow to study it is the key to guaranteeing the impact of our research in thefield of human–computer interaction (HCI). Only if studies can be comparedand integrated into a common model ,or even theory, others will begin tobenefit.The present reply is selective. I address the following six loosely con-nected, conceptual aspects, which I consider important.• Beauty as an experience versus beauty as a judgment.• Beauty in objects as a desired extension of the self.• Does visceral beauty exist?• Beauty as a neither less nor more elusive judgment than usability,utility, or satisfaction.• Shall we focus on objects or on individuals?• Any lessons for design?I am aware of the many other issues, large and small, raised but not ad-dressed by the reply. They are not lost. There will be many future opportuni-ties to further research and discuss them.

Activities for Students: Discovering and Exploring Mandelbrot Set Points with a Graphing Calculator

The Mandelbrot set is one of the most beautiful and complicated objects in all of mathematics. The border of the set is infinite; no matter how many times you magnify the set, dazzling new images appear. Mandelbrot's discovery of the set and his subsequent work on fractals and recursive functions would not have been possible without the aid of the computer. Although the mathematics behind the Mandelbrot set is simple, creating the Mandelbrot set images involves millions of calculations.

The primacy of beauty in judging the aesthetics of objects.

The conceptual structure of the aesthetics of objects was investigated. To this end, associative namings for the word "aesthetics" were collected from 311 nonartist German college students in a timed verbal association task. 590 different adjectives were produced, depicting diversification of the concept. The adjective "beautiful" was given by more than 90% of the participants. The adjective "ugly" was the second most frequent naming, used by almost half of the students. All other namings were markedly less frequently produced. It is argues that the beautiful-ugly dimension represents the primary concept in the aesthetics of objects, so that performing aesthetic judgments of the beauty of objects comes naturally to individuals. In other words, the most prototypical aesthetic judgments are those of beauty. Furthermore, the majority of generated words had a positive valence as measured by an additional valence-rating study including 41 participants. This result contrasts with comparable studies of emotion terms, as such studies typically show a negativity bias. Frequency in general language use and valence of the adjectives did not account for the results.

Gendered Vision(s) in the Short Fiction of Harriet Prescott Spofford

Gendered Vision(s) in the Short Fiction of Harriet Prescott Spofford Birgit Spengler In Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary describes important changes in visual technology and visual culture that predate both the advent of impressionism and Wharton's or James's obsession with observers and beautiful objects. Crary has located a break with the hitherto dominant perspectivalist scopic regime in the early nineteenth century. I will argue that this break is reflected in the fiction of Harriet Prescott Spofford (1835-1921), a central but as yet underestimated writer in the American literary tradition, especially with regard to issues of vision. My general thesis is that a strong interest in questions of vision goes further back than the rise of impressionism and that there is a tradition in American women's writing that is concerned with vision and visual structures from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present. Spofford's concern with vision places her in this tradition and renders her a significant example of the inextricable links between vision and gender. In the following, I will investigate Spofford's interest in vision in three areas: visual technological innovations, questions of artistic representation in the fine arts, and the implications of social regimes of vision with regard to gender. I will argue that Spofford's depiction of visual practices and her ambivalence about the changes she describes indicate a crisis in seeing that is closely linked to her examination of gender relations. But before I concentrate on Spofford, I briefly want to come back to the break Crary has described, to explain why and how questions of "looking" had already become increasingly important during the early and mid-nineteenth century. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the camera obscura, relying on the principles of Cartesian perspectivalism, had served as an example for both the functioning of perception and epistemological insight for at least two hundred years. According to this model, vision is primarily in the service of a nonsensory faculty of understanding, knowledge is founded on a supposedly objective view of the world. The light falling through the hole in the camera obscura corresponds to the light of reason in the inner space of the mind that alone facilitates knowledge of the world. The camera obscura decorporealizes vision and performs a process of individuation. It relies on the assumption of a profound [End Page 68] distinction between interior observer and exterior world, and it presupposes a quasi-immaterial and monocular observer. Physical research, physiological discoveries, and philosophical inquiries into the possibilities of human understanding from the early 1800s onward undermine the camera obscura model of vision in various ways and render the relation between observer and world more ambivalent. New scientific findings emphasize the binocularity of human sight, acknowledge its temporality, locate vision in the materiality of the body, and thus endow the observer with "a new perceptual autonomy and productivity" (Crary, "Modernizing" 35). Vision is considered subjective, temporal, and nonveridical. On the other hand, the merging of the domain of optics with new knowledge about the functioning of the body in the human sciences is part of the reorganization of knowledge and the increasing interest in controlling and utilizing the capacities of the human body as described by Foucault. The looking subject is positioned at this watershed between old and new understandings of vision, between notions of objective truth and subjective insight as well as between autonomy, standardization, and regulation. The boom in the invention of optical devices in the middle decades of the nineteenth century brought publicity to new knowledge about human sight and ruptured the assumptions about human vision of a broad public. In Spofford's stories, references to optical devices, physical phenomena, and the visual arts give evidence of her knowledge of how such elements reflect changes in understanding the world, their consequences, and, possibly, their epistemological implications. Even though she does not focus on issues of vision exclusively, they form a continuous sublayer and often have a considerable influence on plot and/or characters. In the detective story "Mr. Furbush," for example, a murderess is hunted down by means of photographic evidence and the relatively new possibility of the almost infinite enlargement...

The Crumbling of an Ivory Tower

The news that filtered out of Iraq in late March 2003 via, in my case, a TV screen in an Italian hotel was horrendous; the pictures of a devastated Iraq Museum and a distraught director left me, too, in tears. This was followed by rage at what at first sight seemed to have been the wanton destruction of much-loved, exquisitely beautiful objects like the Uruk Head described by Professor Bahrani. This rage quickly gave way to a flood of sympathy for our colleagues in Iraq, who had not only lost so much, but who were, in addition, soon being cast by the media as the villains of the piece.

Illuminated manuscripts and their makers

Illumination is the art of lighting a page through the use of illustration to break up text and make it more comprehensible. This work describes the extraordinary skill and artistry that went into the making of these medieval masterpieces and features pages from the finest examples in the collection of the V&A.Illuminated manuscripts are widely recognized as among the most beautiful objects of the western world. This is a book about their making: about the many talents involved in producing the missals, books of hours, brevaries and bibles. Illuminated manuscripts were collaborative productions, with different specialists contributing script, initials, borders, illustration and binding to any work. This study brings individual scribes and book dealers to life and throws light on the commercial and religious environments in which they worked.

A Julia Set That Is Everything

We see unpredictable behavior around us every day: in the way weather patterns change, stock markets fluctuate, or wildfire spreads. We can also observe chaos in seemingly simple mathematical functions, and many recent undergraduate dynamical systems textbooks [5, 10, 11, 15] discuss chaotic systems. These texts all include chapters covering Julia sets, the part of the domain where a complex function behaves chaotically. A Julia set is usually an intricate and beautiful object, and images of Julia sets can be found on posters, book covers, T-shirts, screen savers, and web pages. Many books [10, 11, 15] focus on Julia sets of complex polynomials of degree 2 or 3, and even the casual reader will observe from the pictures that all of these Julia sets appear to have area zero. For polynomials, it turns out that there must always be some large region where the function has very predictable behavior. What if we examine other types of functions? Is there a complex function whose Julia set is everything? That is, does there exist a complex function that acts chaotically on its entire domain? The picture of such an example would be entirely black.

Cross-Casting in French Court Ballet: Monstrous Aberration or Theatrical Convention?

The phenomenon of men playing women's roles in the theatre has always provoked comment, and often controversy. Anti-theatrical tracts in Renaissance England, for example, are riddled with the complaint that actors who perform female roles are 'monsters'. This charge stems not only from a belief that cross-dressing will lead to effeminization on the part of both cross-dresser and viewer, but moreover from the way cross-casting highlights disturbing insights into questions of personal identity. In this article, I examine the ways in which this notion of monstrosity is played out with regard to cross-cast roles in French court ballet under Louis XIV. While cross-casting is sometimes employed to monstrous effect, it will be seen from contemporary ballet programmes that the monstrosity of a man appearing in feminine attire was subordinate to the need for women at court to conform to their role as beautiful object.